India will be Coursera’s largest global market by the end of 2023: India and APAC MD

Raghav Gupta, Managing Director of India and APAC, said that India has around 19 million users of the global upskilling platform and is growing at 28 percent year-on-year (YoY).

India is set to become the largest market for Coursera by the end of 2023, surpassing the US, Raghav Gupta, Managing Director, India and APAC, said. This comes at a time when upskilling and higher education platforms continue to grow and raise more funds in India, despite the ongoing funding winter.

According to Gupta, India has around 19 million users of the global upskilling platform and is growing at 28 percent year-on-year (YoY), compared to 22 million users in the US, growing at 22 percent YoY. Europe is growing at 17 percent YoY.

The Indian market saw a near-5X jump, growing from four million in the pre-pandemic time to 19 million now.

“Based on the pace of growth, we think India will be larger than all of our markets by the end of this year. And this is all coming from our B2C platform where individuals learn. Then, over the last many years, we worked with businesses, governments and campuses, too. And this is now about 7,000 institutions,” Gupta told Moneycontrol.

Some of the corporates the platform is working with include PwC India, Infosys, Tata Communications, and Reliance Industries to name a few.

Currently, Coursera gets around 50 percent of its revenue from the consumer segment of individual learners, 30-35 percent from the B2B segment, and the remaining from college degree offerings.

The platform is also piloting a jobs portal called Coursera Hiring Solutions, which will be first tested in India before its global foray. It has already started working with Axis Bank for the pilot.

Integrating ChatGPT

Gupta highlighted that earlier many jobs, such as waiters, personal care, retail, sales and bank cashiers, which didn't require formal education, were at risk of getting disrupted by automation through Artificial Intelligence (AI).

And now with technologies like generative AI and ChatGPT coming into the picture, that trend too is changing. Jobs of financial managers, general managers, lawyers, media professionals, and business managers – most of which form Coursera’s key consumer base, are now at risk of getting automated.

“In 2023, with the exposure to GPT-4, the situation has changed quite dramatically. Earlier, automation was impacting people with low levels of education. But now the impact is coming on some amount of college degrees. All knowledge workers or white-collar workers are now the ones who are exposed to change,” Gupta said.

"Now, one thing that will become even more important is human skills; whether it is interpersonal skills, self-leadership, cognitive skills around critical thinking, communication, or planning," he added.

On those lines, Coursera is pushing its Leadership Academy courses which it started a few quarters back. It is also launching courses on ChatGPT for use cases, such as for content writers at media companies, CXOs looking to integrate ChatGPT into their company products and businesses, etc., to help people get familiar with the technology.

Apart from that, Gupta said that Coursera itself is looking to integrate ChatGPT into the platform to personalise courses and make them more interactive.

“Our sense is that once we figure out how we will integrate ChatGPT into Coursera ― and our teams are actively working on this ― it will take that learning from passive to active to interactive. You can actually engage with ChatGPT.”

Earlier in January, speaking to Moneycontrol on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Coursera CEO Jeff Maggioncalda had said that the platform had plans to integrate ChatGPT with its courses. He had also said that the software, which has taken the world by storm, and which he regularly uses, keeps him awake at night.

“It definitely keeps me awake ― the power of this technology. I have been awake for 45 days – I use ChatGPT. It can create new things, it's extraordinary. It’s early, it’s dangerous, and it can disrupt things,” he said.